The mobile Internet, and especially location based services (LBS) are evolving applications relating to the use of the Internet. Additional terminal capabilities and the 3G service network are beginning to reach the market. The development of these services places at issue the privacy of end users and devices utilizing these services.
As the use of the mobile Internet expands, the resolution of security and privacy issues will become increasingly important. End users will desire to maintain the privacy and security of various types of data associated with devices with which they access the mobile Internet including things such as the MSISDN (phone number), location data associated with the mobile device, time and time related data, services accessed by an end user, and user IDs and passwords. Along with these expanded desires of end users to protect certain types of user information has come the development of laws relating to the mobile Internet and particularly location information associated with users. Countries are beginning to propose regulations on how the location of end users may be processed and provided to third parties.
While present mobile location applications are usually based upon a user initiated location request provided directly and only to the user, future applications such as network initiated positioning or triggers causing the position of an end user to be tracked, raise increased privacy aspects with respect to the party requesting positioning information. Thus, some manner for providing user control of location data and other types of privacy information would be greatly beneficial in the developing uses of the mobile Internet.